What’s Firefly? A quick rundown of a neat Fire Phone feature

Firefly was rolled out today, and Amazon is banking on it to tie you into their ecosystem even more than you are already. Firefly is simple enough, but also worth discussion. Just what is Firefly, and why should you care? We give a quick rundown of what Firefly is, and what it’s about.

Here’s the skinny: Firefly is shopping, in your pocket. The features uses the camera to recognize items, then finds them on Amazon. CEO Jeff Bezos says it can recognize “hundreds of millions” of items, too, and catalog them for you to buy later. So, if you’re out and about and see something you want, just snap a pic via Firefly. It will save it for later, kind of like Google’s “What’s this song?” widget.

Firefly can also find information from a picture. Say you find a flyer for guitar lessons; just snap a pic, and Frefly will try to pull the important data from the shot. You don’t have to worry about getting just the flyer, either — if it sees other junk around it, Firefly will scrape it for you.

That’s a quick rundown of Firefly! We’ve got more features on the way, so stay tuned and keep checking back for all your info. 3D is incoming!